Busloads of women, children taken from polygamist compound town

Published 7:00 pm, Saturday, April 5, 2008

Child Protective Services and law enforcement on Sunday were still trying to locate and remove all the children living at a West Texas compound founded by polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.

They've been unable to locate the teen whose complaint prompted the raid. No arrests have been made.

Nearly 160 children, accompanied by 60 adults, had left the compound by Sunday, but CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said they were still looking for others. It was not clear how many children may still be on the sprawling desert ranch which has multiple buildings.

The women and children who were removed from the compound were bused to a historic fort in San Angelo, where Meisner said they could be housed in one place and medical and other services would be more accessible. Most of those who boarded buses in Eldorado were women and girls, dressed in long pastel dresses. Many were carrying bedding.

Meisner said CPS officials are having difficulty locating the 16-year-old girl who phoned authorities to complain of abuse last week. Many of the girls are young mothers, and they share similar names _ or are changing them, she said. Authorities are also having difficulty determining the girls' ages.

So far, the search of the compound, which began Friday, has been peaceful.

Officers entered the white temple on the grounds late Saturday after some tension with sect leaders, but authorities have otherwise described members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as cooperative.

"There were some tense moments last night, but everything has remained calm and peaceful," Allison Palmer, a prosecutor from a nearby county handling the case, said Sunday.

State troopers armed with a search warrant raided the compound to look for evidence of a marriage between the girl who complained and 50-year-old Dale Barlow.

Under Texas law, girls younger than 16 cannot marry, even with parental approval. The girl allegedly had a baby at 15. Her call was the first in Texas complaining of possible abuse, though Jeffs, Barlow and other members of the sect have faced prosecution in Arizona and Utah.

Palmer said other law enforcement agencies "know where (Barlow) is and have talked to him, but our investigators have not."

Barlow's probation officer told The Salt Lake Tribune that he was in Arizona.

"He said the authorities had called him (in Colorado City, Ariz.) and some girl had accused him of assaulting her and he didn't even know who she was," said Bill Loader, a probation officer in Arizona.

A call to Loader by The Associated Press was not immediately returned Sunday.

Barlow was sentenced to jail time last year after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender for three years while he is on probation.

The search warrant instructed officers to look for marriage records or other evidence linking the 16-year-old to the man and the baby. The warrant authorized the seizure of computer drives, CDs, DVDs or photos.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headed by Jeffs after his father's death in 2002, broke away from the Mormon church after the latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.

The compound sits down a narrow paved road and behind a hill that shields it almost entirely from view in town. Only the 80-foot-high, white temple can be seen on the horizon.

Authorities kept onlookers miles away from the compound, which FLDS church members began building several years ago as authorities in Arizona and Utah began increasingly scrutinizing the group.

Jeffs is jailed in Kingman, Ariz., where he awaits trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives.

In November, he was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.

Eldorado, a dusty town surrounded by sheep ranches, has fewer than 2,000 people and is located nearly 200 miles northwest of San Antonio.